When ancient weaving patterns from the deep mountains of Hainan meet the spotlight of Parisian runways—on February 12, 2025, at the Première Vision Paris (PV Show), a handbag featuring Li brocade jacquard craftsmanship became the center of attention in the exhibition hall.
You may not have heard of “Li brocade,” but it holds the millennium-old wisdom of Chinese textiles: the ancestors of the Li people used a “waist loom,” dyed kapok threads with wild garcinia to create red, yellow, and black hues, and wove patterns of sun, moon, stars, birds, beasts, fish, and insects. This time, the team from Donghua University’s College of Textiles and enterprises joined forces to give this once-endangered craft a new lease of life—retaining the delicate texture of traditional “warp jacquard” while using modern dyeing technology to make the colors more durable, paired with a minimalist bag design, infusing old craftsmanship with a fashionable edge.
It’s worth noting that the PV Show is like the “Oscars” of the global fabric industry, where fabric procurement directors from LV and Gucci are annual attendees. What appears here are the “seed players” of next season’s fashion trends. As soon as the Li brocade jacquard series was exhibited, Italian designers asked, “Can we customize 100 meters of this fabric?” French fashion media commented directly: “This is the gentle subversion of Eastern aesthetics to global textiles.”
This isn’t the first time traditional fabrics have “gone viral,” but this time, the significance is particularly different: it proves that old craftsmanship doesn’t have to be confined to museums—Sichuan brocade’s shimmering brilliance, Zhuang brocade’s geometric rhythms, Song brocade’s millennium-old patterns, as long as they find the connection between tradition and modernity, can transform from “intangible cultural heritage archives” into “market hits.”
As the designer of the Li brocade handbag said: “We didn’t change the ‘mountain orchid rice’ pattern, but replaced it with more durable blended threads; we didn’t discard the ‘Hercules’ totem, but turned it into a commuter bag that can hold a laptop.”
When Chinese traditional fabrics stand on the international stage not just with “sentiment” but with the hard power of “mass-producible, stylish, and story-rich,” perhaps soon, the shirts and bags in your wardrobe will carry the warmth of millennium-old weaving patterns～
Post time: Jul-02-2025